The Women In The Genealogies Of Jesus
These are the 5 women in the genealogies of Jesus (show on board)
Does anyone know why these five women are linked together?
They are the only women mentioned in the genealogy of Jesus that is recorded in Matthew.
It’s interesting that they are there at all because Jews didn’t normally include women in their genealogies.
So the fact that they are there at all is really interesting.
is going to quickly read the genealogy in Matt 1 that mentions these women, skipping a few of the names.
Originally I was just going to talk about these 5 women in Matthew,
but I found out how interesting all the genealogies in the gospels
are. So we’re going to have a look at those as well..
Does anyone know why history records were really important to the
Jews? ( because anyone who couldn’t trace their family had no
inheritance and you were treated as a dispossessed foreigner). So this
made genealogies important… so they could claim their inheritance.
SHOW LIST
COMPARE Matthew and Lukes list - completely different till we get to David.
MATTHEW the genealogy only goes back Abraham. Any theories why?
I think it’s aimed at the Jews... that’s what all the commentaries
say and Matthew seems to put a lot of emphasis on proving to the Jewish
readers that Jesus is their Messiah… especially refers to Old
Testament quotations about Jesus being the fulfillment of the
prophecies.
Normally the information about these women would be hidden, but they
are specially included there I think to emphasise that God shows
grace…and that He works through the most unlikely people . I think He
wanted to emphasize this. The 4 women not counting Mary all had
unacceptable qualities to the devout keeper of the law. At least 3
were Gentiles. Today that might not mean much, but back then people
were obsessed with racial purity. Having a Gentile in your family tree
was like having your worst enemy for a grandmother. You could be looked
down on in your social standing if you were descended from a mixed
marriage.
The Jews liked to trace their ancestry back to Abraham, they were
very proud of this. I think this list is a reminder to them that
although they liked to think of themselves as righteous, their own past
history was full of sin… especially with the mention of Bathsheba as
Uriah the Hittite’s wife.
Just a few pages over in Matthew 3 v 9… John the Baptist says to the Jews “Do
not presume to say to yourselves ‘We have Abraham as our father’ for I
tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham”
So its quite strange to have a list of names that traces the natural
descendents back to Abraham, and then God says a couple of pages later,
that if all He was concerned about were natural descendents, He could
use a pile of stones. Its really not children of Abraham by the flesh
God wants, but children of Abraham by faith. I think that the list in
Matt. is designed to remind the Jews of their past, and to show it was
a history full of imperfect people and sinners... and there were some
God had blessed who weren’t even Jewish…and He had shown them grace.
LUKE The genealogy in Luke does not have any mention of women… the
commentaries say it was more aimed at Gentiles. It fulfilled the
prophecy to David that Jesus would sit on His throne…he was descended
from David through Bathshebas other son Nathan who was born after
Solomon. Its amazing that these 2 lines go through 2 of Bathsheba’s
sons.
MARK simply says Jesus Christ the Son of God… so that makes the
list of names a whole lot more simple… He just looks at Jesus as being
the one who had been promised by Isaiah the prophet… the Son of God.
JOHN doesn’t have a list of the blood line of Jesus, it makes the
point that if we are God’s children, then who we are naturally
descended from doesn’t matter. The gospel of John places the
importance, on being children of Abraham through faith, not on being
descended from him naturally.
Would read John 1 v11- 13
So John’s gospel really emphasizes what God wants, children of faith, not those who happen to be born Jewish.
JOHN has the genealogy that I like the best…
So that’s a brief look at the 4 gospel genealogies… now I’d like us to think a bit more about the women that Matthew included.
All these five women have lessons for us. They weren’t all perfect,
some of them made really big mistakes, BUT we can learn from their
mistakes, and we can learn from their courage, and the things they got
right. God used them all as part of His plan to bring Jesus into the
world. The fact that Jesus came from such a line of mixed people,
really emphasizes that it is a lineage of grace that Jesus was born
into. These women would have been ‘disqualified’ if God’s calling
depended on righteousness of the Law. The mention of them here also
shows that Jesus identifies with sinners even in His genealogy, just as
in His birth, baptism, life, and death on the cross.
I’d like to make two lists on the board about these women.
1. Why they were unlikely choices to be in a Jewish royal line?
and then
2. what the challenges in their lives would have been… and maybe we
can think about what we would have done in the same situation.
They women really were faced with some of the most difficult
circumstances that you ever read about, and a lot of those
circumstances were beyond their control,..some of them found themselves
in a situations that were not of their own making, and some made bad
mistakes… and got themselves into a mess. But God still showed grace to
them, when the law would have condemned them.
We’ll start with Tamar. Which is really not a nice story. Just to
get the setting for Tamar’s story… it was after Judah and his brothers
sold Joseph to the Ishmaelites. Joseph was stuck down in Egypt and
Judah left home and went and married a Canaanite… probably feeling very
guilty about Joseph.
I’ll just get to read a few verses to
remind us of what happened to Tamar. READ Gen 38 v 6-7.. ok we know
the rest of the story how God slew Tamar’s second husband as well .
Judah sent Tamar back home to live with her own family again , he was
scared his next son would die if Tamar married him too. Then Tamar
concealed who she was and met Judah on the road, and she ended up
becoming pregnant to Judah… it’s not a nice story at all, and I’d never
given much thought to the plight of Tamar until I began to re-think
things from Tamar’s perspective.
I think it’s really likely that when Tamar found herself in such
miserable marriages, that she may well have done a lot of thinking and
even had the opportunity from Judah , with whom she was now in contact,
to find out about the true God… we are not told this, it’s only
speculation, but it’s possible.
It’s worth pointing out what the law said about what Judah and Tamar had done, Lev 20 v 12 says”If a man sleeps with his daughter-in-law, both of them must be put to death.”
So accoding to the law… both Judah and Tamar should have been stoned.
the Law made no allowance for the intention of the heart and could only
judge the situation by what had actually taken place.
Let’s think about Tamar and her life.
Can anyone suggest what challenges she faced? E.g. Judah GOT a wife
for his eldest son Er….2 wicked husbands… did she have any choice …
sent back to her parents in disgrace…All these bad things had happened
to Tamar, and they were all out of her control… as far as I can see she
had no say in any of theses thing, they were circumstances that just
happened to her, so up to this point she had a really bad life, and it
probably last for quite some years… because the youngest son had time
to grow up… so she’d had probably years of a miserable life.
Obviously she didn’t do the right thing by deceiving Judah, but he
had not done the right thing by her either. So in a way it was perhaps
Judah’s wrong actions that had caused Tamar to do the wrong thing, and
the lesson is that we can be the cause of making other people stumble
like Jesus warns us of in Matt. 18 where he says “if anyone causes one
of these little ones to sin.” We can’t entirely blame Judah for
Tamar’s sin, because we are all responsible for our own actions, but if
Judah had done the right thing to start with, then Tamar wouldn’t have
been in the situation she was.
So what can we put on the board about Tamar?
Next in the list is Rahab. This is someone its easier to talk about
because we know definitely that she was good. She is listed in the
chapter of the faithful, Heb 11 and I’ll
ask to read out verse 31
Thanks , so we see that her faith was in welcoming the spies…I’ll ask to read Joshua 2 v 10-11
So Rahab recognized that the God of the Israelites was the one true
God… and God would have seen this faith that Rahab had…. In fact maybe
the whole purpose of the spies going into Jericho was really for
Rahab’s benefit. When you think about it..they went into Jericho,
heard Rahab’s report, and went home again… did they really need to be
told that the inhabitants of the land were afraid, or was it God’s way
of saving Rahab because of her faith.?.. any thoughts?
So why was Rahab an unlikely choice for a royal line from a human perspective?
She had been a harlot… she wasn’t Jewish
Now I’ll ask to read Joshua 6 v22-25
Can anyone detect in these verses an indication of some challenges for Rahab after she was rescued?
V 23… set them outside the camp. How welcome would most of the
Israelites have made an outsider? They would have known she was a
harlot, and they set her and her family outside the camp.
What challenges did she face?
(overcome the prejudice of not being Jewish, the prejudice of having
been a harlot, maybe having to leave her family… we don’t hear of them
as joining also).
I think that there would always have been some Israelites who looked
down on Rahab and thought of her as an outsider because of her past…
especially as they placed so much importance on their roots and
background of being Jewish. I think there are lessons here for us
today, to be welcoming of people who don’t come from our backgrounds….
We are told that Rahab married Salmon, and they had a son called Boaz.
We know that Boaz married Ruth … they had a son Obed who had a son
Jesse, who was the father of David. So that makes Rahab David’s great
great grandmother. And Ruth was David’s great grandmother …no doubt
it’s from where David inherited some of his good qualities.
RUTH we all know her story really well. She lived in the time of
the book of Judges… a time when God really did use some of the
strangest means from a human point of view to achieve His purpose.
The whole of the book of Judges is full of stories of people winning
battles with no weapons, when all the odds were stacked against them.
Stories like Shamgar beating 600 Philistines with an oxgoad (which was
just a pointed stick) and Deborah and Barak fighting Sisera with no
virtually no weapons except for their faith in God… and Gideon using
jars and torches to beat an army. They were times of reliance and
faith in God… and it was around this time that Ruth lived.
Would read Duet 23 v 3-6. So these
were pretty harsh words for the Moabites, and that’s what Ruth was. So
again under the Jewish laws, Ruth would not have been welcome, even
though she had a wonderful character…The Law wouldn’t have taken Ruth
as a person into account, law just sees things from the legal
perspective… and she shouldn’t have been in the congregation of Israel,
but she was.
What challenges did Ruth face?
Death of her husband, leaving family, going to where she would be resented. Not having
money.
BATHSHEBA
Unlikely choice.. she may have been a Gentile. Committed adultery.
What she had to live with… resentment of other widows. Death of her
first baby. Guilt of her husband’s murder. YET 2 of her sons were
chosen for a special purpose… surely God showing grace to Bathsheba as
He had to David.
MARY …she had an uncertain future.. .. I don’t think that things
turned out at all like Mary would have expected. What challenges did
she face?
She would have had people looking down on her for being pregnant
before she was married. It seems that Joseph died. Jesus didn’t become
king straight away… He was killed.
I’ll end by reading out a paragraph I found on the internet:
“If the genealogy of Jesus comes as a stinging rebuke to human
pride, it can also come to us as a gentle solace to whatever we have
experienced at the hands of human devastation and dysfunction. The
stories of Matthew’s five women are the stories of widowhood, second
and third marriages, incest, prostitution, lying, murder, adultery,
economic hardship, foreign exclusion, and geographic dislocation. He
reminds us that there is nothing that can separate us from God’s love
(Romans 8:39), and that there is nothing of life’s bitterness that
cannot be woven into God’s providential, redemptive history for us. Our
Stories are not over; there are more chapters to be written, may we
hear, above all, the sound of God’s voice in our lives as we remember
their lives”.
A sisters’ class by Sis. Robin Jones [Hurstville, Australia]
